Free Breakfast Served Anytime by Sarah Combs

Calvin say?”
    “I don’t know. I mean, he doesn’t know yet, either. He’s meeting us there. So hurry, okay?” God, I couldn’t wait to hang up.
    “Wait a minute.”
    “What?”
    “What are you all worked up about?”
    “Nothing. I’m not worked up. Who the hell is Edward Softly?”
    Mason groaned. “My roommate,” he said. “He’s so obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft that I think he actually thinks he’s H. P. Lovecraft. He also thinks it’s approximately 1922.”
    “Perfect.” I laughed. “H. P. Lovecraft and the Mad Hatter. Are yall running a freak show over there or what? Fun-house rides and warped mirrors, the whole shebang?”
    “Wanna come over and be the Bearded Lady?” Mason quipped, not missing a beat.
    “Um, pretty sure I don’t have a beard,” I said. A nonsensical response to a nonsensical dig, but still my hand rose reflexively to my chin, just to make sure. I gathered my robe more tightly around me and shook my hair free of its towel turban, once again paranoid that Mason with his demon gaze could somehow see me sitting there in my diva-duck getup.
    “We’re also auditioning for the spangle-clad aerialist, but you’ll have to get in line.” I could hear his smug grin through the phone.
    “I am hanging up now, Mason. Half an hour, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Without saying bye I returned the six-ton receiver to its cradle and vowed that I would henceforth keep one-on-one communication with the Mad Hatter to an absolute minimum because, good God, the boy made my
teeth
hurt.
    On the way to the Egg Drop, I spotted Calvin, his bright head lowered in thought, crossing the street in his trademark bashful lope. “Hey!” I yelled, waving maniacally. “Calvin, wait!”
    Calvin offered a gallant elbow and I linked my arm with his as we crossed the street. “Hey, thanks for the butterfly. You’re quite an artist.”
    “You’re welcome,” Calvin said. “It’s just scribbling, really. Just something I like to do on the side.”
    “Oh, on the side,” I teased him. “You know, when I’m not working out algorithms and playing around with Punnett squares and whatnot.”
    Calvin grinned sheepishly and opened the door of the Egg Drop for me. Chloe was already there, hunched over the jukebox. When she saw us come in, she beamed and waved her arm in the direction of the table we had occupied the day before. “I ordered us some pancakes and coffee,” she said. “Breakfast is on me today. Be right there. I’m trying to get this thing to play my song.”
    I slid into our booth and Calvin followed. I watched with interest as he carefully unwrapped his napkin-rolled utensils, placing his fork, knife, spoon, and chopsticks in perfect, proper alignment with the space that would soon be occupied by his plate. GoGo would have wept.
    Chloe crooned along with the jukebox — some song in inscrutable French — as she waltzed toward the table, one hand pressed to her chest in a dramatic swoon of emotion. “Oh, God, yall, I love this song,” she gushed, spilling herself into the booth. “Can you imagine being gorgeous,
and
being a singer-songwriter,
and
having your songs all over movie sound tracks and jukeboxes in America, all while being the First Lady of France? It’s wild. It’s ridiculous and unfair. Why am I not French? Why?”
    Calvin and I watched patiently as Chloe closed her eyes and sang in perfect French along with the jukebox, pausing during the instrumental parts to take a long invisible drag from a chopstick. When our pancakes and coffee arrived, she looked up at our server — same one from yesterday, I wondered if she ran the place entirely by herself — and gushed, “Oh, Xiu Li, I am in the wrong century. I am in the wrong
country
. These pancakes are beautiful!
Merci
.”
    “This country not so bad,” Chloe’s new best friend Xiu Li replied. “Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.” She was talking about the pancakes but it seemed like she was talking — with no small amount of gratitude and